The Meter: Happy 17th birthday to the Millennium Music Conference

Good to see the Millennium Music Conference, Harrisburg area's notable music-biz powwow, showing legs into its 17th year. Also comforting is conference's settling on the correct spelling of what was promoted for years as "Millenium," confusing databases and causing considerable teeth-gnashing within the editorial community.

Vatican press corps claim to have been caught flat-footed by Pope Benedict XVI's announcement that he's retiring at the end of this month. Obviously no one made the connection when FedEx came by the other day to pick up the papal golf clubs.

Give credit to the Borough of Carlisle for ingenuity in converting citizens' pocket change into municipal revenue. Maybe we should welcome the new digital parking meters with their choice of payment plans ranging from phone transfer to smart cards. And should none of these arrangements be to your liking, you will be automatically connected to Six-For-Five Louie at the end of the block for short-term assistance.

Where have you guys been? Major League pitchers, catchers and rookies wandering back to the diamond to get loose for the 2013 baseball season. For Pennsylvanians the ritual comes reflection on the ultimate loyalty test that goes back to 1880 when the Pittsburgh Alleghenies stole second-base star Louis Bierbauer from the Philadelphia Athletics and earned media-driven vilification as "pirates," which seems to have stuck.

As a career choice for the technologically inclined, forensic science has emerged as the new rocket science. What was once "the fingerprint guy" or "the drugs-test division" has advanced to the point that injustices are being corrected and the dead put to rest using technology that didn't exist until recently. Thus a skeleton found in Perry County in 2010 is identified through DNA analysis as Teresa Mae Ware of Mississippi. The police now have a victim and the victim has a name.

Heads up, all you phoebes, phalaropes, pheasants, godwits, gadwalls, gnatcatchers, woodcocks, widgeons, bobolinks, pigeons, oystercatchers, geoducks, red knots, dowitchers and siskins! You're fair game this weekend, at least for dedicated birders called to action by Audubon Pennsylvana for the 16th annual Backyard Bird Count. Be warned: There may be an impostor lurking in the above sightings list.

Former Gov. Dick Thornburgh is looking good at age 80, thanks in no small part to the restoration of the trademark Waldo eyeglasses he sported throughout his administration. Seems when Thornburgh left Harrisburg to become U.S. attorney general in 1988, someone in Washington convinced him to switch to contact lenses. Out with the wonkish eyewear, in with the new bare-faced look that probably fit in well with the rest of the Reagan administration. But to Pennsylvanians, it just wasn't the same old Dick.

This Commonwealth Foundation poll showing broad support for liquor privatization is strong stuff. Already legislators are poised to strike a blow for reform of the state's cranky 80-year-old liquor marketing system but few seem to know how to seal the deal, or, for that matter, where to begin. Questions of transition, revenue and personnel don't stand up to easy answers. And what of the future of the Liquor Control Board's regulatory/enforcement authority? Who wants to un-bell that old cat?